Had some media law refresher training this morning. It was tough going back three years and trying to remember specific cases but the best bit of the session were the debates about the challenges now faced by journalism when it comes to online and the law.

The web is moving quickly and with certain acts dating back to to the last century, you won’t find mention of Facebook in the legal statements. First things first, if you’re unsure about media law go and grab a copy of McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists. You won’t regret it.

The three main things we discussed were dealing with breaking news online, and in particular breaking crime news, the use of content from social media sites (particularly images) and commenting on stories by users.

Breaking news online and the dangers

A crime has happened. The Police are on the hunt for two men who have raided the local betting shop. They are armed. You have the basic details and after confirming you’ve got it online. The headline screams out ‘Armed raid at betting shop’ and you’ve got an image of the smashed in door of the betting shop. No arrests have been made. Do you turn the comments on the story? You’ll likely just end up with a load of hearsay that will become obsolete once the Police make arrests but you might also get some extra details, you might stumble upon an eyewitness.

A few hours later and the Police force issued stills of the men they are looking for from the CCTV and give more accurate descriptions. You run these images in full with a big appeal for information from the Police. You create this as a separate article and through your keyword tagging the articles become ‘related’ in your content management system.

You leave the old article in the content management system and overnight the Police name the two men they are looking for and release mugshot images of them. You create a new article and run these images, again this story joins your ‘related stories’ list.

The arrests are made and you’ve still got all the information up on your site. Three articles, all with varying levels of detail and images. Possibly some video of the CCTV and a load of comments from readers. Charges are made and eventually, the trial will start and all this content will be in your archive and might start showing up in the related stories column.

Solution? Have one article and keep that updated. Avoid creating new articles if possible. Keep an eye on pictures/video and remove when no longer relevant. Avoid any compromising photos, just use straight up headshots. Ensure your CMS provides a ‘last updated’ date and timestamp somewhere on the article.

Use of content from social media sites

Facebook and Twitter. A goldmine of information and content, but a legal minefield? There’s not many tests cases out there in terms of using content from social media sites. We had an example of taking a photo from a social networking site of a 17-year-old girl who had died, but the photo showed her drinking alcohol.

Now the dead can’t sue for defamation but the mother would probably not be best pleased to see a smiling photo of her now-dead daughter with a glass of champagne in her hand. Plus, who owns the copyright to the photo?

Solution? We decided we’d run the photo, but probably crop out the alcohol aspect. Or try to find a more suitable photo. In terms of copyright, it’s a tricky one and does seem standard journalist practice now to rip photos from websites despite the copyright resting either with the social network or the user who uploaded the photo.

Commenting on stories

The elephant in the room. Do you post-moderate or pre-moderate? Do you have someone monitoring comments all-hours? Do you let people comment on every story? Do you close comments after a set period of time? Or is it just a free-for-all and it’s the Internet damnit and we can’t control it. Do you let journalists engage in the comments and the debate, or do you tell them to steer clear?

Solution? We couldn’t reach one. But we were sure that media websites benefit massively from having comments on stories – but for court stories the comments should be turned off. We felt more needed to be done to educate people commenting on the idea of ‘fair comment’ and how what they said needed to be based on facts, an honest opinion, without malic and in the public interest. We felt it was important for journalists to be able to respond to comments and engage with the debate as journalism is becoming a two-way process.

Image credit to Eric E Johnson

It was a very interesting morning. The above is just a taster but any of your experiences relating to media law and online journalism would be welcomed in the comments below.

Got up ridiculously early on Friday 16th July to head up the motorways, with Joni Alexander in tow, to take part in the ScraperWiki Hacks and Hackers event in Liverpool.

Despite feeling as though we’d stumbled into the middle of a Liverpool Daily Post & Echo school outing, we soon found ourselves immersed in trying to use data to tell a story and do something useful with it.

Media organisations have access to, possess and make use of a lot of data. But how much they make use of it, is limited. The Guardian is certainly leading the way with the DataBlog, to give you the numbers behind the headlines but particularly in regional and local journalism there isn’t a lot of spewing out of data. That’s mainly because there just aren’t the resources or the time.

However, we enlisted the help of master programmer Julian Todd, the man behind The Straight Choice, to get us up and running. Our team (me, Julian, Joni and Jo Kelly) had a big interest in local information, so we trawled through the Liverpool Echo’s website in the districts section. Huyton. Toxteth. These are the places where our readers live and what do they care about? With talk of public sector cuts and ‘frontline services’ being protected we thought it would be interesting to show how scraping data could help expose any cuts to ‘frontline services’. So ‘Plod Watch’ was born – complete with a rather rubbish hand drawn logo.

We scraped the data from the Merseyside Police website about PCSOs and PCs. We were able to pull contact information for each officer and a photo of them as well. We then set about attaching the Merseyside Police areas to the Liverpool Echo’s areas. Very different as we discovered.

Eventually we came up with a page that showed all the officers who policed that Liverpool Echo district. Now the clever bit. Everytime Merseyside Police update their website and remove an officer, a big red X will appear across that officer’s face and an email will be sent to the journalist who covers the patch to find out why. Officer promoted? Officer left for better things? Or have the ConDem cuts come swinging their way into a frontline service?

We also scraped the Echo’s website itself to show the story count in a graph for the district. This could then be filtered down to show the story count for crime stories in the Echo website. We could also look at embedding the faces of police officers in the relevant district pages to as a ‘your local police’ widget allowing people to click through directly to their local officers. No more the faceless, car driving, bobby. They’d be on the virtual beat.

The day itself showed some amazing things could be done with data, and showed how when programmers/developers are paired with journalists they can do some great things. It reminded me though that despite all this great data, you still need journalistic minds to interrogate it and find the stories and pick out what’s important to people.

So, keep your eyes peeled as Plod Watch might be coming to a local newspaper website near you.

You can read some great write ups about the day from Alison Gow and Mike Nolan

How do you or would you use data? Have you seen any examples of regional/local websites publishing data? Let me know in the comments below

Image credit to guinavere

Went to a Leadership Launchpad event on Monday 7th September at the New Continental on Broadgate, Preston.

It was an event hosted by North West Vision and Media and it was aimed at getting the leaders of creative industry into a leadership programme, called LEAD.

LEAD operates via many host institution’s, the one we were being sold was run by Lancaster University, and it was interesting to find out what was offered by the programme. LEAD offers the chance to learn more about leadership, especially if your business is three/four years underway and you need the chance to step back and get a different viewpoint. It’s not like a degree course, it’s very hands-on and there’s lots of workshops, guest speakers and action-learning.

The unique thing about this LEAD programme is that it is only for creative businesses, as they found that people who lead these kinds of organisations have a different perspective on things compared to conventional businesses – who are often largely driven by profit and not much else.

So, while there was a bit of hard sell the evening was a good chance to learn more about the programme. I’m definitely not in a position to go on it yet but it’s the sort of thing that in a few years time, if successful with Blog Local, I might give the time of day to – and it would also depend how the business is financially!

The event was free, which was nice, and speaking to the nice ladies from North West Vision & Media afterwards it was eye-opening to find out just how many networking events there are for not just creative businesses but businesses in general across the North West and also all the opportunities for funding, partnership working, grant funding and training that North West Vision & Media can help businesses tap into.

Image credit to anselm23